Dinner. Various acts. Music. Presented amid stained glass, mahogany and chandeliers — in a tent. An alternate reality sets up shop for three months in Costa Mesa.

As the outré Euro-style dinner-theater called Teatro ZinZanni parks its vintage 1910 Belgian spiegeltent on the scrubbed architectural grounds of the Segerstrom Center for the Arts for the next three months, there's much cooing among the ZinZanni staff about the luxuries of this Costa Mesa locale. "Marble bathrooms," says associate artistic director Reenie Duff. "It's a huge deal."

On a break from retooling scenes for the three-hour vaudeville revue "Love, Dinner & Chaos," ZinZanni Artistic Director Norm Langill and star improvisational comedian Kevin Kent concur about the lush surroundings. Settling down for an extended run on the lawn beside the Renée and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall affords the Seattle-based organization access to luxe restaurant support from Leatherby's Café Rouge, state-of-the-art rehearsal rooms, as well as those clean, plumbed bathrooms. Yet Kent — who 15 years ago was working in raunchy burlesque theater and radio with infamous Seattle sex columnist Dan Savage before joining ZinZanni as the cabaret's deliciously naughty, nougat center — still takes the outsider's view. "We might be at this beautiful place, but you'll notice we're out on the lawn," he drawls. "Out-side."

Producer Langill — who looks as though he could be a devilish 1970s Mad magazine illustrator — cracks a crooked smile. "Kevin's right," he says. "We're like a party on the lawn of the estate," he says. "But it's an elegant party, with elegant people having a lot of fun."

Large-scale fun on the lawn is Langill's forte. Since 1980, his One Reel production company has produced Seattle's raucous Bumbershoot arts festival, now North America's largest urban summer festival. Booking rising talent such as Soundgarden and pairing unlikely acts like Mel Tormé with the Ramones are some of Langill's fondest memories ("Mel was crying [with joy] when he left the stage").

Running a supper club sprang instantly and irreversibly to Langill's mind in 1992 when he encountered his first spiegeltent (Dutch for "mirror tent") on Los Pampas during the Barcelona Olympics. His initial 1998 show model continues to this day: a three-hour semi-narrative melee featuring top-draw acrobats, aerialists, comics and chanteuses, backed by a keen orchestra, with the players winding amid the crowd, inviting interaction.

In a new show created for Costa Mesa, viewers proceed through a five-course meal designed and created by Leatherby's chef Ross Pangilinan with Patina founder Joachim Splichal while the artists — with the wait staff's help — undergo astonishing physical and vocal metamorphoses, with people and plates soaring through the air, wardrobes malfunctioning and a select few audience members enduring chokingly funny participatory escapades. The San Francisco Chronicle's Steven Winn dubbed the form "a hearty, high-concept diversion" with "captivating entertainment."

Langill has never aimed for pure historical re-creation — the current show's theme is supper club meets old-time radio station broadcast — but he does have certain parameters for his creations. Few pop cultural references, little to no technology, lots of physical comedy, plus an attitude that's racy but not crude coalesce into an aesthetic that Langill calls "pre-Twist."

"I always imagine it's sort of like the late-night clubs in Paris," Kent says. "The doors are closed, it's after hours, and now the girl is on the swing.... Not only do you leave your cares and troubles behind, but you leave all the other conventions behind," Kent explains. "You're kind of coaxed into our reality."

To achieve that transporting effect, Langill says, "I would not underestimate the tent. There's a gasp when [people] first walk in. And, boy, I tell you, in performance it helps 100% to have the audience be a little bit off the ground before you start."

ZinZanni's commitment to these Deco-era tents — gorged with stained glass, crystal chandeliers and carved mahogany booths — necessitates a flexible, peripatetic life for the organization. Finding locales has been a saga of special ordinances, historical variances and the fine art of building out the tent enough to bring it up to permanent code. In Seattle, it took three major moves until the organization found permitting for a long-term lease from the Seattle Opera House six years ago.